All posts tagged Josh Hamilton

An arbitrator has ruled that Los Angeles Angels outfielder Josh Hamilton did not violate his drug treatment program and may not be suspended or disciplined by Major League Baseball, the league said in a statement.

The question of whether Hamilton violated his treatment program was submitted to MLB’s Treatment Board, and MLB representatives and MLB Players Association representatives were deadlocked on the issue. An outside arbitrator was appointed to break the tie and ruled that “Hamilton’s conduct did not violate his treatment program. As a result of that decision, the Office of the Commissioner is not permitted to suspend or impose any discipline on Hamilton.” Read More »

Landon Donovan reacts during the U.S.’s win against Panama in the Gold Cup final.

There are so many reasons to not put money on the U.S. in next year’s World Cup, especially if you’ve still got kids to put through college, and yet it’s hard not to be filled with a homer’s optimism when thinking about how they might fare in Brazil. After a resounding result in the CONCACAF Gold Cup tournament, which climaxed with a terse 1-0 win over Panama, the U.S. has made a strong claim as the best team in the region (despite missing a chance to dispatch rival Mexico). Even if that’s only as good as the ninth-best team in Europe, it’s still something.

Throughout the tournament, the U.S. outscored its opponents 20-4 and built up an 11-game winning streak; they also had the top two scorers in Landon Donovan and Chris Wondolowski. What’s exciting, though, is that most of the players who took the pitch this tournament aren’t likely to see tons of time in Brazil, meaning there’s a whole new tier of performance that’s theoretically in play. That the U.S. has wrung consistency and depth out of their roster along with attacking power has been a result long in the making, given the initially tepid returns on coach Jurgen Klinsmann’s imported philosophy. A conflict with Donovan, the closest thing to a bonafide Stateside soccer icon and an obviously oversized fit for the B team, also might’ve been a distraction, though they patched things up. (“If these three weeks in July are Donovan’s punishment for taking a holiday in Cambodia and skipping out on a few World Cup qualifiers,” John Godrey writes for American Soccer Now, “we’d like to state for the record that he has served his sentence, he was a model prisoner, and we wish nothing but the best once he’s back on the outside.”) But in the middle of this winning streak, such growing pains seem a world away. Read More »

Connecticut players celebrate after defeating Louisville 93-60 in the national championship game.

It’s a tribute to the program that Geno Auriemma has built at the University of Connecticut that Tuesday night’s historic victory in the women’s NCAA final—it was Auriemma’s eighth title, tying him with Pat Summitt for the most in women’s college hoops history—felt like old news. Fans could spend a year not paying the slightest attention to women’s basketball, look up to find UConn steamrolling an opponent in the NCAA Championship Game—the final score, the most lopsided in the history of the women’s final, was UConn 93, Louisville 60—and feel reassured that all is right in the universe. But while UConn made it look easy on Tuesday against an underdog Louisville team that finally ran out of upset-springing magic, Connecticut’s most recent title wasn’t automatic. Winning a NCAA title never is, of course. But Auriemma’s eighth championship is a result not of the dominance of the previous decade, but a willingness to adapt to a changing college hoops landscape.

“Auriemma has dealt with bigger stars and built better teams than this one,” the Journal’s Ben Cohen writes. “Connecticut won 90 games in a row between April 2008 and December 2010, including two national championships, and produced some of the sport’s legends, like Maya Moore and Diana Taurasi. Four of Auriemma’s eight national titles capped undefeated seasons. His team this season, though, had four losses: one to Baylor and three to Notre Dame. ‘We were a team of good players,’ Auriemma said. ‘We became a great team.’” Read More »

We live in a world where a $125 million contract isn’t close to the most expensive one on a rich baseball team.

Spoken as recently as a year ago, the following statement would’ve prompted healthy scoffs from most serious baseball fans. But yes, it does seem true that Los Angeles may be MLB’s new epicenter for elite play and ceiling-less expectation, given the cavalcade of high-profile signings and trades bringing more and more of the game’s best players out West. Less than a week after the Los Angeles Dodgers re-asserted their status as baseball’s biggest new whale by tossing a small national GDP’s worth of cash at Zach Greinke, the Los Angeles Angels returned the favor by stealing the prodigiously talented Josh Hamilton away from the Texas Rangers, their division rivals in the American League West. The Rangers weren’t willing to pay as much as the Angels did for a player who’d struggled with the lingering effects of a much-publicized drug addiction, including a somewhat brittle body that saw him missing extended stretches of time over the last few years. But given the chance to solidify their already eye-popping lineup, which includes the former best player alive (Albert Pujols) and the future best player alive (Mike Trout, who might already be the best by some metrics), the Angels had no qualms about dropping a reported $125 million over five years on Hamilton, who goes from one high-pressure situation to another. Read More »

The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim have shocked the baseball world–and fired a shot across the bow of their free-spending SoCal rivals, the Dodgers–by signing the top free agent on the market, Josh Hamilton, to a five-year, $125 million deal, according to multiple news reports.

What had been a sleepy free-agent season for baseball has now witnessed a mind-boggling shower of cash for a player with a checkered past full of question marks. The man on the giving end of this mega-deal, Arte Moreno, can now lay claim to having made baseball’s signature move for two straight winters, after his Angels stunned observers last December by swooping from seemingly out of nowhere to sign Albert Pujols to a 10-year, $240 million deal.

J.R. Smith and the Eastern Conference’s best team: the New York Knicks?

The NBA season is very long, and this season is very new. So it’s probably wise for fans not to read too much into, or get too excited about, the full-spectrum walloping that a short-handed New York Knicks team handed to the defending champion Heat on Miami’s home floor Thursday night. It’s probably wise, but also something like impossible, given that it’s the second time this season that the Knicks have handled the Heat, and that their most recent convincing win came without the assistance of centerpiece star Carmelo Anthony. The narrative this time is not last season’s favorite, “Heat In Disarray.” It is, with all the caveats that it is early and the season is long and see above, that these Knicks might be for real, after all. Read More »

During the second inning of Thursday night’s game at the Ballpark at Arlington, Shannon Stone did something that many Daily Fix readers have probably done themselves, at some point in their lives. He called out to Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton in hopes that Hamilton would throw a ball up to where Stone and his young son were sitting. Hamilton obliged, Stone leaned over the railing to catch the ball for his son, and what began as a warm and recognizable reiteration of a familiar ballpark ritual suddenly became something incalculably sadder. Read More »

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Jeremy Gordon is a freelance writer who lives in Chicago. He has written for TheAtlantic.com, MTV and Prefix and occasionally Tumbles and Tweets. The last time he cried was when Steve Bartman dropped the ball.

Jared Diamond writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal. He currently serves as a beat reporter covering the New York Mets and Major League Baseball.